GameRoom: Disco Elysium
The back room of the Whirling-In-Rags isn't colourful to look at, but it illustrates what makes the game so vivid to play.
I very nearly got a tattoo of a significant moment that means a lot to me from Disco Elysium. I still might.
The great thing is there are countless instances within Disco that could count as a significant moment that means a lot to me. Do I mean the moment you set the phrase ‘One day I will return to your side’ alight in tribute to dead allies? Is it when, after a game’s worth of having to overcome possibly the most debilitating bout of self-loathing in fiction, your character solves the impossible mystery and is rewarded by the simple, awesome phrase ‘Detective. Arriving. On the scene’? Is it ‘I want to have fuck with you’? The answer is ‘yes’.
There are countless moments like that throughout Disco. It is an impeccably crafted, crumbling world in which every location offers the opportunity for something memorable. From something as simple as taking a running jump off a roof to making an impossible skill check to hear the voice of La Revacholiere – the literal soul of the city – direct you to your goal, almost every interaction can make magic from the mundane. Over the course of the days-long narrative, your broken detective can piece himself back into a viable human using those moments to hold himself together.
What’s more, those moments are meaningful because they’re as likely to fail as to succeed. You can snatch failure from the jaws of success. You can literally die due to how uncomfortable a chair is because you don’t have the volition to get up or the physicality to endure it. You can fail to find the hole in the world because of a bad roll, or get your partner killed through poor decisions. By the end of the game, your detective can be a shattered joke of a man, alienated from everyone, with only days or weeks left to live.
Whether you succeed beyond all expectations or confirm everyone’s worst beliefs about you, Disco Elysium is built upon those moment to moment decisions and – because of how beautifully designed the world is – they’re all intimately associated with a specific part of the environment. I’ll never forget, for example, making an impossible skill check to ‘teleport’ up the side of a building by the beach, or when I convinced Kim to dance in the church nightclub.
But there’s one room in Disco Elysium in particular that sticks out to me as embodying the absolute heights of the game’s approach to storytelling. And that’s the back booth of the Whirling-In-Rags.
Apocalypse Cop
Briefly, Disco Elysium begins with your character – an amnesiac detective – waking from a multi-day self-destructive bender of unimaginable proportions in the Whirling-In-Rags hotel. With difficulty you can piece together the barest minimum of the world and your own history with the help of your skillset – each of which has a personality and mind of their own. These skills are how you interact with the world, and levelling them up can be as much a hindrance as it is a help. Levelling up your Electrochemistry skill, for example, allows you to identify symptoms and traces of drug use in NPCs – but can also lead to your detective’s addictions reasserting themselves, forcing you to imbibe every stimulant pill you find along the way.
Partnered up with goodest of the good cops Kim Kitsuragi, you are tasked with using those skills to solve the murder of a man found hanged behind the hotel. Along the way you’ll examine the extent to which the murder was motivated by personal reasons, or inevitable as part of a wider tapestry of events in the world of Disco. Along the way you’ll pick up many other smaller mysteries that teach you more about the setting, and may or may not have been a factor in the murder of the Hanged Man.
One potential lead takes you to the booth in the Whirling-In-Rags bar. It is the haunt of the Hardie Boys – enforcers for the dockworker’s union – who are, undoubtedly, withholding information from you.
Show them you mean business
There are so many ways this high stakes encounter can play out. You can use a skill to identify and prod the most nervous of the gang, for instance. You can pass a Composure check to uncover a hole in their story about the murder. You can leave and come back with information gleaned from other sources to force them to reveal something. Or – in one of the best moments in gaming – you can attempt to use your Authority skill to force them to talk.
Authority is a difficult beast to master. Without any points in it you have no ability to compel the public to aid in your investigation. But with too many points you become borderline-fascist and obsessed with exerting your divine right to boss people around. It’s likely that the booth in the Whirling-In-Rags is when you’ll see the negative consequences of overinvesting in one skill writ large, when you can indulge Authority and borrow a gun from your partner to “help” you exert that authority. With a few failed skill checks, the chain of actions can all-too-easily lead to your detective putting the gun in his own mouth to demonstrate how serious he is – at which point Authority will insist you pull the trigger to “show them you mean business”.
It is hilarious. It’s also only one of countless ways in which the interrogation of the Hardie Boys can go, each of which ultimately helps determine what sort of cop you are – and what sort of person you aspire to be.
Beyond the booth, the world of Disco Elysium spans far past the areas you can visit. Without giving too much away, the world of Revachol is far more interesting that its allohistorical mish-mash of various cultures first appears. It is, in no small way, responsible for the state your detective is at the start of the game – a human embodiment of the entropy that is eating away at the whole world. But, in the Whirling-In-Rags booth and other areas, it becomes clear that you can affect the world in turn. Your detective’s actions ripple out to impact not just the characters you interact with but the fictional world beyond. As you repair yourself, you help piece the world back together.
Played that way, your detective can be a force of negentropy. And it’s in the booth in the Whirling-In-Rags, in which you can overcome all the confusion, tension and anger to make sense of it all, that that becomes truly apparent.